An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

by David Zweig

Overview

A searing indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments’ decision-making process behind pandemic school closures.

An Abundance of Caution is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year.

Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms—among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates—were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.

The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262549158
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	199,156
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

David Zweig is the author of the novel Swimming Inside the Sun and the nonfiction book Invisibles. He has testified twice before Congress as an expert witness on American schools during the pandemic, and his investigative reporting on the pandemic has been cited in numerous congressional letters and a brief to the Supreme Court. Zweig’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, Wired, The Free Press, The Boston Globe, and, most often, his newsletter, Silent Lunch. He lives with his family in New York State.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“An Abundance of Caution is a book the world badly needed. David Zweig writes crisply, with a rare combination of journalistic rigor and empathy. But his book is unsparing in revealing how frustratingly predictable many of the mistakes made during the pandemic were—and how partisanship was used to suppress the pursuit of science and undermine the public interest. As much as some might hope to forget the pandemic, An Abundance of Caution is indispensable reading for preventing the next catastrophe.”
—Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of Silver Bulletin

“This book is important. It tells a disturbing story. Faced with the erosion of its legitimacy and authority, the scientific community needs to engage seriously with Zweig’s analysis.”
—Paul Romer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at Boston College

“For those interested in the failure of evidence-based medicine and public health to protect our children during prolonged COVID school closures, An Abundance of Caution is a uniquely rigorous, incisive, and must-read account.”
—Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Former Dean, Harvard Medical School

“A powerful analysis of the largest public health intervention in modern history. Using a clear, scientific approach, Zweig asks piercing questions that shed light on medical dogma propagated by groupthink.”
—Marty Makary, MD, Johns Hopkins surgeon and author of Blind Spots

“Through both his reporting and his congressional testimony, David Zweig was one of the only journalists brave enough to tell the truth about the ill-fated school closure policies during the pandemic. His book is a meticulously researched history of unpopular, scientifically unsupported, socially catastrophic policy decisions.”
—Matt Taibbi, investigative journalist, bestselling author, and publisher of Racket News